Clients who visited the Mayfair studio of society photographer Hugh Cecil in the 1930s found themselves in a curiously exotic room. The walls were silver and the ceiling was black. Where the fireplace ...

As everyone who has heard of Monte Carlo, Maria Callas and Jackie Onassis knows, Christina Onassis, Bolker, Andreadis, Kausov, Roussel was the much married extremely rich girl who searched for ...

In the summer of 1940, Britain was staring down the barrel of a gun. Defeated by the Germany Army on land and besieged by U-boats at sea, the nation was forced to rely on its last defence against ...

‘Anyone of no public eminence of whom the world in general has never heard (and I come into both these categories) is presumptuous in thinking he can write a book which people will want to read.’ Thus ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

Anglo-Saxon London suffers from an image problem, or more precisely from the problem that we have no image of it at all. In contrast to the showy glamour of Roman Britain, with its amphitheatres, ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

America, América is the by turns woeful, despairing and ironic tale of the USA’s sustained attempts to turn its southern ...

Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks; On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays by Henry James (Edited by ...